J. Peder Zane | All Articles

J. Peder Zane

J. Peder Zane is journalist who has worked at The News & Observer of Raleigh and The New York Times. His writing has won several national awards including the Distinguished Writing Award for Commentary from the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

He has contributed to and edited two books published by W.W. Norton, “The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books” (2007) and “Remarkable Reads: 34 Writers and Their Adventures in Reading” (2004). He is a former Board Member of the National Book Critics Circle. He is completing a book with Professor Adrian Bejan of Duke University titled “The Law of Life: The Scientific Principle Behind Evolution and Design in Nature.”

He teaches Mass Communication and Journalism at St. Augustine’s College in Raleigh.

Ross Douthat must live in the eye of the hurricane. While the rest of us feel battered by months of bitter negotiation over the fiscal cliff and are bracing for more punishment as the debt ceiling fight brews, the New York Times columnist sees the new year as a sea of tranquility.

As his re-election hopes dim by the day, President Obama’s cheerleaders in the media take heart from opinion polls that show that while a majority of Americans are unhappy with his policies, they like him personally.

A few years ago, I began assembling a doom and gloom file. Lickety-split it was filled with newspaper and magazine articles lamenting the “grim times” and “dark days,” the “hopeless epoch” we were being fated to live through. And none of these writers were fundamentalist Christians.

The arguments over media bias are not just tiresome – they don’t go far enough. In fact, much of the mainstream media, especially in their opinion pages and talking-head analysis, have crossed the line into propaganda. Where bias reflects a particular way of looking at the world that emphasizes some facts over others, propaganda is an echo-chamber effort to skew facts in order to serve a larger “truth.”

The dust jacket is by far the best part of David Shields’ latest work, “Reality Hunger: A Manifesto” (Knopf, $24.95, 219 pages). In bold multi-colored type, the front and back covers are filled with not just praise but downright prostration from the brightest literary stars, including J.M Coetzee (“exhilarating”), Jonathan Lethem (“sublime”), Lydia Davis (“compulsively readable”) Amy Hempel (“brilliant”), Richard Powers (“incendiary”) and Frederick Barthelme (“stunning”).